Today, the methods most commonly used to communicate or otherwise route documents from one location to another tend to be limited to certain designated endpoints, which typically include e-mail inboxes and fax machines. However, these methods provide a narrow addressability base, in that documents can only be routed to e-mail addresses associated with target inboxes, fax numbers associated with receiving fax machines, and so on. Moreover, the information that conventional document routing systems typically use to address these limited routing endpoints often has little (if any) native connection to business rules, which can impose a substantial impact on efficiency, costs, and legal and regulatory compliance due to different constraints that may be associated with handling invoices, claims, order forms, or other business documents.
In other words, conventional document routing systems tend to give users the discretion to connect incoming documents with the appropriate business rules and process the incoming documents into appropriate business applications based on controls that define how the incoming documents should be handled. As such, businesses that employ conventional document routing systems may face governance, risk, and compliance vulnerabilities, among other risks, due to the difficulty or inability to ensure that users properly handle incoming documents based on relevant business rules.
Furthermore, many businesses tend to have relationships that require collaboration and interaction across organizational boundaries, which can raise concerns relating to security, access controls, and proper management relating to how documents, data, and other information that one business may share with another should be handled on the receiving end. For example, a particular business may have relationships with other organizations to outsource certain operations or otherwise engage in partnerships or interactions that involve processing business related documents. However, conventional document management systems tend to fall short in suitably providing an organization with the ability to control how important or sensitive information will be handled once documents or other materials move beyond organizational boundaries.
Moreover, with cloud and virtualized data centers having increasing prevalence in the modern business marketplace, the opaqueness associated with how third-party entities that provide cloud and virtualized data centers implement access controls or other management mechanisms associated with data hosted therein can compound these security concerns due to the inability to control governance, risk, and compliance issues in third-party data centers based on unique business requirements.
Accordingly, conventional systems that attempt to provide mechanisms to route and manage documents suffer from these and various additional problems.